Friday, October 13, 2017

“If
you look around, you can find a face of God in each thing, because He is not
hidden in a church, in a mosque, Temple or a synagogue, but everywhere. As
there is no one who lives after seeing him, there is also no one dying after
seeing him. Who finds Him, stays forever with him.” …………..Shams
Tabriz

In
explaining the title of his book “The undiscovered
Self”, Carl Jungstates:

"Why
has the ‘Self’ gone undiscovered?" I must tell you that my American
publisher had the grace to invent this title. I would never have thought of it,
as the Self is not really undiscovered, it is merely ignored or misunderstood. For
about 1900 years we have been admonished & taught to project the Self into
Christ, and in this very simple way it was removed from empirical man, much to
the relief of the latter, since he was thus spared the experience of the Self,
namely the “unio oppositorum”. He blissfully does not know the meaning of the
term."

The
above two references are from a Sufi mystic, whom Rumi considered as his
teacher, and a great depth psychologist. These two contain a great truth which
results from a question as to why the “Self has not been discovered.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great rationalist philosopher, in
articulating his take of how it is that we can think and speak at all writes in
his book “Tractatus” by giving an expression,
probably very close to high validity, to a conception of ourselves that was
arguably already embedded in our intellectual culture. A conception of
ourselves through a composite of our individual representation – mind, which
can represent, in a purely subjective mode, the outside world to ourselves, through
this mental disposition. we think and say things that are true or false. This
mental existence is assumed to be infallible and is used as a tool for acquiring
truths about the world – which we call science. This picture of the nature of
mind, and hence of ourselves, continues to be the default conception in the
cognitive sciences. Minds are representational engines. This reasoning from Wittgenstein
could be used as the nature of the only artefact of the “Individual self”.

As
Jung says, the higher Self, which is very much within oneself, was assigned to
an external metaphysical objective concept such as Christ or any other Divine
object of adulation and worship through which various religions taught us the
path to realization of Divinity. This is a misleading path orchestrated for
humans to have an innate satisfaction that the process to seek the “True Self”
was this sole path.

When
Shams Tabriz says “there is no one who lives after seeing him” he means one who
is a purely materialistic existence because in this mode we assign an external
attribute to the Self. This is is a futile exercise. As long as we have a
rational mind rooted in this bodily manifestation, the subjective experiences
which do not conform to apriori objective concepts are pushed back and
invalidated. This is the evolutionary burden we carry. A consciousness which
has increasingly become divorced from unitive perception, through nearly 40,000
years of increasing dominance of the rational mind. This is the main block in
reaching back into the very depth of our inner self.

In
this article I am limiting myself to the early Christian father’s understanding
of “unio oppositorum”, an androgyny of opposites.

One
of the emergent concepts in the writings of the Fathers of the early Greek
church is that of theosis, or the deification of humankind. This idea—that
humankind is to find communion with God through assimilation to him, that
humankind is to be glorified and become divine itself—finds its locus classicus
in Athanasius's statement that God became human so that we might become God.
“For he [the Word of God… was made man,” Athanasius declares, “that we might be
made God.” [1]

Gregory
of Nyssa holds that the very purpose of the Incarnation, Death, and
Resurrection of Jesus is to deify humankind and render it immortal through its
union with and participation in the divine nature. “In the suffering of His
human nature,” Gregory writes, “the Godhead fulfilled the dispensation for our
benefit, that all the corruptible may put on incorruption, and all the mortal
may put on immortality, our first-fruits having been transformed to the Divine
nature by its union with God. [2]

We
have lost track of this line of thinking through an extreme control agenda in
all religious traditions and it is time with the emergence of integral
consciousness in Homo Sapiens we transcend in the evolutionary ladder to Homo
Deus seeking and finding the “undiscovered Self”. This is what Christ says in
the Gospel of Thomas:

“Jesus
said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they
find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and
will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]" …………Saying 2

This
is the unrelenting process of seeking the higher truth and in its discovery a
radical disturbance or transformation and then Joy unbounded then a final
culmination in Nirvana,

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